Maher's stances get him called a bigot. We should thank him instead, for taking a necessary battle to the faithful

Bill
Maher, the host of HBO’s “Real Time,” is a shining beacon of the New
American Enlightenment, radiant with goodness and hope.

But first, a bit of background.

No
matter what anyone says, religion is a deeply, if darkly, hilarious
topic, and the sundry tomes of the sacred canon read more like joke
books than anything else, albeit sick joke books. How can we, in the 21st century, having mapped (and even edited)
the human genome, engineered pluripotent stem cells, and discovered the
Higgs Boson, be expected to revere the dusty old Bible, for example,
with its quarreling goatherds and idolatrous tribesmen, and its golden
calves and talking snakes, to say nothing of its revenge-porn (against
unbelievers) finale? How can we not laugh aloud when Genesis declares
that Almighty God made the world in six days and rested on the seventh,
yet had to pilfer a rib from Adam to produce Eve? What are we to make
of Numbers 22:28-30, wherein the Lord intervenes, not to part the sea or
still the sun, but to set Balaam’s donkey a-jabbering? How are we
supposed to accept Jesus as an up-to-snuff savior when, in Matthew 21:19
and Mark 11:13-14, he loses his temper and cusses out a fig tree,
condemning it to death, for not bearing fruit out of season? Any second-grade science-class student would have known better, and possibly even exercised more self-control.

“Properly
read,” declared the science-fiction author and biochemistry professor
Isaac Asimov, “the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever
conceived.” He was right. The same may be said of the Quran, the holy
book of Islam, which the late, dearly missed Christopher Hitchens called
“not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of
plagiarisms, helping itself from earlier books and traditions as
occasion appeared to require.”

The proper response to religion,
riddled as it is with absurdities, is, thus, laughter, either of the
belly-slapping, table-pounding kind or the pitying, head-shaking sort.
Laughter, but also outrage. After all, those who take such absurdities
as manifestations of the Godhead have, especially since the Reagan
years, hogged the moral high ground and commandeered American politics,
polluting public discourse with their reactionary cant and halting
progress in reproductive rights, science (think the Bush-era ban on stem
cell research) and education (to wit: stubborn attempts to have
oxymoronic “Intelligent Design” rubbish taught in schools). Look
abroad, and the panorama of savagery religion must answer for curdles
the blood. No rationalist could contemplate all this entirely
unnecessary faith-driven regress and backsliding with anything but
anger, tempered with despair. If we want to do true and lasting good in
this world, we are morally obligated to fight faith in the open, and
root it out from every nook and cranny in which it hides.

Facing
such a task, a desire for comic relief is only natural. Bill Maher is
where anger, outrage and religion meet – in humor. (This essay will
address only his stance on religion.) There is nothing un-American
about his faith-bashing – far from it. Thomas Jefferson, who denied the
divinity of Jesus, wrote that, “Ridicule is the only weapon which can
be used against unintelligible propositions” – and what is religion but a
jumble of unintelligible propositions about our cosmos and its
origins? Yet Maher has incited no small amount of ire among both the
faith-addled masses (fully two-thirds of Americans believe Jesus actually rose from the dead, and almost half
expect him to return in the coming decades) and their muddleheaded
sympathizers for his brutal broadsides against religion, and Islam in
particular. Bigot!Racist!Islamophobe!
they cry, at times bemoaning the “offense” they purport to have
suffered from his words, and illustrating how far the cognitive
capacities of so many of us have deteriorated since Jerry Falwell and
his Moral Majority began meddling in politics. (This can be no
coincidence.) Their real message to Maher: Shut up!

Name-calling
is the last resort of losers — in this case, losers waging an unwinnable
war against the spread of godlessness. And “shut up!” is the last
command of which the Greats of the Enlightenment and their heirs would
have approved. The 19th-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill,
in On Liberty,
put it best, referring to suppressed speech: “If the opinion is right,
[the shutter-uppers] are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error
for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the
clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its
collision with error.” If Maher is really so wrong, why not let him
hoist himself by his own petard?

These days it’s not unusual for someone on the way to work to receive
a text message from her employer saying she’s not needed right then.

Although she’s already found someone to pick up her kid from school
and arranged for childcare, the work is no longer available and she
won’t be paid for it.

Just-in-time scheduling like this is the latest new thing, designed
to make retail outlets, restaurants, hotels, and other customer-driven
businesses more nimble and keep costs to a minimum.

Software can now predict up-to-the-minute staffing needs on the basis
of information such as traffic patterns, weather, and sales merely
hours or possibly minutes before.

This way, employers don’t need to pay anyone to be at work unless
they’re really needed. Companies can avoid paying wages to workers who’d
otherwise just sit around.

Employers assign workers tentative shifts, and then notify them a
half-hour or ten minutes before the shift is scheduled to begin whether
they’re actually needed. Some even require workers to check in by phone,
email, or text shortly before the shift starts.

Just-in-time scheduling is another part of America’s new “flexible”
economy – along with the move to independent contractors and the growing
reliance on “share economy” businesses, like Uber, that purport to do
nothing more than connect customers with people willing to serve them.

New software is behind all of this – digital platforms enabling businesses to match their costs exactly with their needs.

The business media considers such flexibility an unalloyed virtue. Wall Street rewards it with higher share prices. America’s “flexible labor market” is the envy of business leaders and policy makers the world over.

There’s only one problem. The new flexibility doesn’t allow working people to live their lives.Businesses used to consider employees fixed costs – like the costs
of factories, offices, and equipment. Payrolls might grow or shrink over
time as businesses expanded or contracted, but from year to year they
were fairly constant.

That meant steady jobs. And with steady jobs came steady paychecks along with regular and predictable work schedules.

It
has been my honor and privilege to produce the Michigan Womyn’s Music
Festival for 40 years. It has been my life’s work, my deepest
commitment, my constant challenge and my most profound joy. Every single
thing of value I have learned in the world I have learned in the
process of being part of building this beloved community. Almost every
friend and family member who I cherish I have met on that hallowed
ground, and every single way I have learned to put my
mind/heart/shoulder into the purpose of creating something beautiful
that honors womyn has come from the sweat I earned on that Land.

I
am writing to tell you that the 40th Festival will be the last Michigan
Womyn’s Music Festival. The spirit of this community will live on
forever, the friends and family we have found on the Land are eternal.
Everything we have created together will feed the inspiration for what
comes next. It’s possible that I will come back with something else, or
that other sisters will take the inspiration of the Michigan community
and create the next expression of our Amazon culture. What is true for
me is that now is the time to bring this 40-year cycle to a close,
stepping out on joy at our most incredible anniversary celebration.

We
have known in our hearts for some years that the life cycle of the
Festival was coming to a time of closure. Too often in our culture,
change is met only with fear, the true cycle of life is denied to avoid
the grief of loss. But change is the ultimate truth of life. Sisters – I
ask you to remember that our 40 year Festival has outlived nearly all
of her kin. She has served us well. I want us all to have the
opportunity to experience the incredible full life cycle of our beloved
Festival, consciously, with time to celebrate and yes, time to grieve.

There
have been struggles; there is no doubt about that. This is part of our
truth, but it is not--and never has been--our defining story. The
Festival has been the crucible for nearly every critical cultural and
political issue the lesbian feminist community has grappled with for
four decades. Those struggles have been a beautiful part of our
collective strength; they have never been a weakness.

For many of
us this one week in the woods is the all too rare place and time where
we experience validation for our female bodies, and where the female
experience presides at the center of our community focus. A place to lay
our burden down from the misogyny that pervades our lives from cradle
to grave…a place to live in intergenerational community, and to live in
harmony with Mother Earth. I know this is true for me. And I have a deep
trust that each and every one of us can take what we have experienced
on that Land and continue to create space that feeds our spirit, creates
diverse community, honors our experience and supports our struggle as
womyn making our way through the patriarchal world. Please take what you
love about Michigan and use it to create something new and beautiful.

It
is important that each and every one of us knows she is empowered to
build on what we have experienced together on the Land. Everything you
feel on the Land, everything you see – is something of spirit, and love,
and passion for female empowerment….for womyn’s community. The
Festival’s 40 years of culture and community are a powerful seed and our
communal experiences have created fertile ground to plant in. I know
that we will find inspiration and vision to create our next time and
space.

For those of us who will be gathering for our 40th
anniversary this August – let’s joyously hold up our incredible
community and allow ourselves to be strong enough to consciously let go
of this incarnation of her, with all the love we each hold in our
beautiful hearts. Let us gather this August knowing that what we truly
cherish about the Festival lives on in each of us, and more will come
from this fertile ground. Let’s do this up together – Amazon proud!

I will meet you there in August – my eyes meeting yours, heart wide open.

The
40-year-old festival, the subject of controversy in recent years, 'is
coming to a time of closure,' says its founder and organizer.

By: Trudy RingApril 21 2015

The 40th Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, to be held this August, will be the last, its founder announced today.

The
storied women-only event, first held in 1976, has been the subject of
controversy in recent years because of its exclusion of transgender
women, with many artists and organizations deciding to boycott. Founder
and organizer Lisa Vogel gave no reason for ending the fest, however, in
a Facebook post announcing the decision.

“We
have known in our hearts for some years that the life cycle of the
Festival was coming to a time of closure,” she wrote. “Too often in our
culture, change is met only with fear, the true cycle of life is denied
to avoid the grief of loss. But change is the ultimate truth of life.
Sisters — I ask you to remember that our 40 year Festival has outlived
nearly all of her kin. She has served us well. I want us all to have the
opportunity to experience the incredible full life cycle of our beloved
Festival, consciously, with time to celebrate and yes, time to grieve.”

She
acknowledged, “There have been struggles; there is no doubt about that.
This is part of our truth, but it is not — and never has been — our
defining story. The Festival has been the crucible for nearly every
critical cultural and political issue the lesbian feminist community has
grappled with for four decades. Those struggles have been a beautiful
part of our collective strength; they have never been a weakness.” She
urged the “Festival family” to “please take what you love about Michigan
and use it to create something new and beautiful.”

The exclusion
of transgender women from the fest has led performers such as the Indigo
Girls, Antigone Rising, and Lea DeLaria to withdraw from the event, and last year several national LGBT organizations signed on to a petition
from statewide LGBT group Equality Michigan calling on the festival to
change its rule limiting attendance to “womyn-born-womyn.” Festival
organizers have said this is not a formal policy but rather an
“intention” that puts “the onus on each individual to choose whether or
how to respect it,” but petitioners said that did not equate to
inclusion and noted that the controversy dated back to a transgender
woman being thrown out of the festival in 1991. Just in the last couple
of weeks, however, three signatories withdrew their endorsement of the
petition.

The National Center for Lesbian Rights “has removed our
name from the petition and will be actively engaged in conversations in
which we honor our differences while also pursuing a conclusion that
supports the gender identity and inclusion of all women in Michfest,”
wrote NCLR executive director Kate Kendell in an April 8 letter to
Vogel, posted by the online publication TransAdvocate, which withdrew as well.“We have faith that such a resolution is possible.”

Opting
out of sexist workplaces is straight out of the universe of boycotts
and strikes. It acknowledges that this is a political problem, not one
to be solved by HR

Women in tech have been told to lean in, back off, be bigger blowhards and simultaneously let others shine.
But by far the most inspiring – and probably the most effective – piece
of advice is the one found on the otherwise rather mysterious new
website tableflip.club: “Fuck that, we’re done. It’s not us, it’s you.”

Meaningful
change, the anonymous woman behind the site told me over email,
requires not just tweaking but reinvention from the top down: “It’s
virtually impossible to change a sick system without being the one in charge.”

You can’t destroy the master’s house, it seems, when the master’s a tool.

Her site went up on Monday and hosts a single, 500-word piece of writing giving voice to years (or decades) of exasperation:

“When
we try to play by the rules (which we do because we’ve seen what
happens to women who don’t) we’re denied opportunities because we aren’t
“ready” for them - and we are ALSO denied the things you say we need in
order to BE ready. When we do these things without your corporate
approval, we do it knowing that we may be the next woman who gets
quietly fired for being too forward. When we try to take a seat at the
table like Sheryl said we should, we’re called presumptuous.”

The solution: “It’s time we take our potential elsewhere.”

What
makes her campaign so novel is that it applies the language and
techniques of political activism to something that’s been treated as a
business problem. Many self-help books and workshops designed to support
women at work actually place the onus of responsibility on them,
encouraging women to brag more but promise less, to be more assertive
and less aggressive.

But the tableflip.club founder rejects the
idea that women should try to adapt to the demands of an already-broken
system in order to survive: “Flipping the tables takes the ‘just try
harder, just sit at the table’ advice and flips it on its head. We’re
already trying so goddamn hard and it’s not working, women are leaving
in droves. So we need to change something”.

Opting out is straight
out of the universe of boycotts and strikes. It acknowledges that the
problems faced by women in tech are inherently political, and can’t be
solved by a human resources department. The difficulties women face
aren’t the problems of one woman, or one team or one company. They’re
not just limited to Adria Richards or Brianna Wu or Ellen Pao; they’re not just Twitter with its no-women board or Wikipedia with its 91% male editors.
The problems are systemic – and no amount of attitude adjustment or
leaning in on the part of those who get screwed by the system can
possible change it.

Not
very long ago I met a young man at a business function. “Hello, I’m
Amanda,” I said, sticking out my hand in greeting. He kept his arms
glued to his side. “I don’t touch women,” he said.

He
was, I realized belatedly, a deeply Orthodox Jew whose tradition
prohibited even minor physical contact between men and women outside
their families. I nodded politely and moved on. But the encounter deeply
troubled me, then and now. Faced with someone who refused to shake my
hand because of who I was, I defaulted to social courtesy, wishing
neither to make a fuss nor disparage this young man’s religious beliefs.

Yet
later I wondered: Why are biased acts against women — even religiously
motivated ones — considered so much less toxic than biased acts of any
other kind? Why do women often demur and accept humiliation rather than
make a fuss? Why does respect even for admittedly extreme religious
beliefs trump respect for half the human race?

My
encounter came to mind again as I pondered recent stories of
ultra-Orthodox Jewish men refusing to take airline seats next to women.
Several cases were reported in the New York Times this month. Others have appeared in the Israeli press as far back as 2012.

On
some flights women reportedly moved when asked. Some men switched
places with women to eliminate the adjacency problem. Some flight
attendants assisted the Orthodox men in relocating. Yet when others did
not, some flights were delayed as men refused to be seated. The
incidents have spawned lively discussions among Jews and non-Jews alike.

Yet I wonder: Why are we even discussing this?

Would
such blatant behavior be treated merely as a social choice, a courtesy
issue or an awkward airline customer-service problem if the targets were
anyone other than women?

Let’s test it.
What if we recast my encounter, giving me a different race and gender.
How do I react now if someone says, “I don’t touch black men.” Do I
quietly move on? How would this young man have reacted had the tables
been turned? What if I had done something I could never imagine myself
doing? Would he have treated it as a social issue if I had refused his
hand, saying: “I don’t shake hands with Jews?”

The
woman who died tragically in a house fire in Southold this morning was a
well-known figure in the feminist movement who left a rich legacy.

Although
police have not yet officially released the victim’s identity, multiple
sources, including friends, her pastor, and Southold Fire Chief Peggy
Killian confirmed that the woman, who was wheelchair-dependent and who
lost her life was Sidney Abbott, 77, a world-renowned crusader in the
women’s movement and co-author of “Sappho Was a Right-on Woman: A
Liberated View of Lesbianism”; the book was written with Barbara Love in
1971.

According to the Southold Fire Department, the fire broke
out at 435 Willow Pond Lane, Abbott’s home, at approximately 10:45 a.m.
Wednesday.

The Southold Town Police dispatch center was advised of a house fire at the above location by a private fire alarm company.

Killian
said former Southold Fire Chief George Berry, Abbott’s next-door
neighbor, tried valiantly to enter the house to save Abbott, who was
home alone; he was “turned back by flames and heavy smoke,” a release
from the Southold Police Department said.

Once fire department
personnel entered the home, they found the female occupant of the house
on the first floor; Killian said she was found in the living room,
sitting in a recliner, a wheelchair nearby. Abbott had a home health
aide who had already left for the day, Killian said.

Her dog, Killian said, was at the kennel and survived the blaze; a cat’s body was found at the scene.Southold
detectives, Suffolk County arson and homicide squads and the Suffolk
County Medical Examiner’s Office are all investigating the fire.
Greenport and Cutchogue Fire Departments also responded to assist.

The
biggest per-capita tallies were in countries known for green awareness,
such as Norway and Denmark, with Britain fifth and US ninth on the UN
report’s list

Agence France-PresseSaturday 18 April 2015

A
record amount of electrical and electronic waste was discarded around
the world in 2014, with the biggest per-capita tallies in countries that
pride themselves on environmental consciousness, a report said.Last
year, 41.8m tonnes of so-called e-waste – mostly fridges, washing
machines and other domestic appliances at the end of their life – was
dumped, the UN report said.

That’s the equivalent of 1.15m heavy
trucks, forming a line 23,000km (14,300 miles) long, according to the
report, compiled by the United Nations University, the UN’s educational and research branch.Less than one-sixth of all e-waste was properly recycled, it said.

In 2013, the e-waste total was 39.8m tonnes – and on present trends, the 50-million-tonne mark could be reached in 2018.

Topping the list for per-capita waste last year was Norway, with 28.4kg (62.5lbs) per inhabitant.It was followed by Switzerland (26.3kg), Iceland (26.1kg), Denmark
(24.0kg), Britain (23.5kg), the Netherlands (23.4kg), Sweden (22.3kg),
France (22.2kg) and the United States and Austria (22.1kg).The
region with the lowest amount of e-waste per inhabitant was Africa, with
1.7kg per person. It generated a total of 1.9m tonnes of waste.

In
volume terms, the most waste was generated in the United States and
China, which together accounted for 32% of the world’s total, followed
by Japan, Germany and India.

Waste
that could have been recovered and recycled was worth $52bn, including
300 tonnes of gold – equal to 11% of the world’s gold production in
2013.

Why aren’t we standing up against the assault on women’s rights?

Well,
finally someone’s finally pointed out what I (and I imagine many
others) have been thinking about but have been hesitant to point out,
while gay rights are doing great, women’s rights have gone down the
tube. And, as bad, men don’t seem to care.

Bringing these nasty inverse trends to light was Gail Collins who in her April 3 New York Times column
contrasted the uproar over potential discrimination against same-sex
couples with the silence that met the passage of new anti-abortion laws
in Texas and Arizona.

Back
home in Indiana at the same time the wrath of entertainers, business
leaders and politicians was focused on the potential harm to gays, Purvi Patel,
a 33-year-old Indiana resident, became the first person in the history
of the United States to be prosecuted, tried and convicted of
feticide—for what she says was a miscarriage and the State argued was an
illegal abortion.

Yet for this actual, not theoretical, harm to a woman, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison, there was no outcry, no threat of boycott and very little news coverage.

While
I and most other feminists applaud the successful protests against
Indiana’s retrograde actions and have been among the most staunch
defenders of gay rights—and in fact I would argue that we are the birth
mothers of the movement through our insistence on decoupling sex from
procreation—I find the disparate trajectories of our movements and
society’s disparate response to our injuries more than a little
disturbing.

While same sex marriage laws have been approved in 37 states and the Supreme Court is poised to overturn the laws of the 13 states where such marriages were banned, nearly 100 years after its introduction, the Equal Rights Amendment for women still languishes.

On
Tuesday in Texas, the House of Representatives voted to take $3 million
earmarked for prevention of H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted
diseases, and spend it instead on abstinence-only sex education. It was a
fascinating moment — particularly when the sponsor of the motion, a
Republican named Stuart Spitzer, told the House that he had been a
virgin until he got married at age 29.

“What’s good for me is good for a lot of people,” he said.

This had historic reverberations. Several years ago, then-Gov. Rick Perry conducted a fabled interview
with The Texas Tribune in which Perry defended the state’s stress on
abstinence-only sex education while his interviewer pointed out that
Texas had one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country.

“I’m just going to tell you from my own personal life. Abstinence works,” Perry retorted.

Does Texas traditionally decide state policy based on politicians’ sexual history? If so, that’s terrifying.

The
debate in Austin degenerated when a Democrat demanded to know whether
Representative Spitzer — who, I have to point out, is a doctor — had
ever tried to proposition other women before his wife accepted.

That
was going overboard. The Democrats should have stuck with their earlier
lines of argument, which included pointing out that Texas gets more
federal money for abstinence-only sex education than any other state,
and that Texas has a teen birthrate that is almost twice as high as
California’s, which has completely barred schools from limiting their
courses on sex to the advisability of not having any.

All
that was news to Dr. Spitzer, who did admit that abstinence-only
education “may not be working well.” This had no effect whatsoever on
his insistence that Texas needed to do more of it. His proposal passed
and went to the State Senate.

So
that was lawmaking on sex in Texas. Meanwhile, over in Arizona, the
State Legislature was passing a bill that requires doctors who perform
drug-induced abortions to tell their patients that the procedure may be
reversible, even though most scientists say it isn’t.

This
business of legislating fiction is rather widespread. The Guttmacher
Institute, which keeps track of these things, has counted 12 states
where women seeking abortions have to be informed that a 20-week-old
fetus can feel pain, research to the contrary notwithstanding. Four
states require that women be given inaccurate portrayals of the effects
of an abortion on future fertility. In five states, a woman who wants an
abortion has to be informed that abortions are linked to an increased
risk of breast cancer.

Friday, April 17, 2015

Think about this one and maybe ask why our Democans and Republicrats are so eager to shove the Trans-Pacific Partnership
Trade Agreement down our throats. Yet another case of fucking the
American people over while shipping our manufacturing to places with no
respect for human rights. At the same time one has to ask: Cui bono?
Who benefits?

The answer the rich assholes on Wall Street, who get
ever richer while the middle class gets foreclosed on and sink into the
working and poverty classes.

China's
hospitals are harvesting the body parts of thousands of political
prisoners and removing their vital organs while they are still alive,
according to a harrowing documentary exposing the horrific
state-sanctioned practice.

Doctors and medical students working
in state-run civilian and military hospitals take up to 11,000 organs a
year from donors under no anaesthetic to supply China's lucrative
"organs on-demand" transplant program, say a network of invesitgators
comprised of international researchers, doctors and human rights lawyers
attempting to end the macabre abuses.

The documentary, Human Harvest: China's Organ Trafficking, by
Canadian filmmaker Leon Lee, followed these investigators for eight
years as they worked to mobilise international condemnation of what they
say is a booming billion-dollar organ harvesting industry for the
benefit of wealthy paying organ recipients.

"When I cut through
[the body] blood was still running ... this person was not dead," said
one doctor of his first encounter with live organ harvesting as a
medical student filmed by Lee.

"I took the liver and two kidneys. It took me 30 minutes," he said.

A
former Chinese hospital worker and doctor's wife, whose identity was
withheld, told Lee that her husband had removed the corneas of 2000
people while they were still alive. Afterwards the bodies were secretly
incinerated.

China has the second highest rate of transplants in
the world, with startlingly short wait times for transplant recipients
of just two to three weeks.

But a recent Red Cross report found
only 37 people nationwide were registered organ donors and harvesting
organs from executed prisoners did not come close to accounting for the
more than 10,000 transplant procedures performed every year.

Human
Rights Lawyer and Nobel peace prize nominee David Matas told Lee that
living political prisoners make up for the shortfall, with the
long-persecuted and banned religious group, the Falun Gong, key targets.

"Somebody's being killed for the organs," human rights lawyer David Matas says.

A thriving middle class is the cause of growth. The middle class creates rich people -- not the other way around

Paul RosenbergThursday, Mar 19, 2015Venture
capitalist Nick Hanauer, a highly visible champion of Seattle’s
$15/hour minimum wage, wrote a piece in the Atlantic last month pushing
on another front in the war against toxic income inequality. “Stock Buybacks Are Killing the American Economy,” he warned, and getting rid of them would be a tremendous boon to the economy.

This
latest front rebukes those who say that raising the minimum wage does
little to address what ails the American middle class. First, it
underscores the obvious: that battling against decades of bad economic
policy must necessarily be a multi-pronged affair, with no single action
able to solve everything at once. But second, it starkly highlights how
much of the problem can be traced to a single source—the profoundly
misguided notion that giving even more money to rich people would
produce prosperity for all. Instead, the exact opposite has happened.
That’s why the attack on stock buybacks is an even more profound attack
on economics as usual, even if it, too, only represents one facet of
what has to be a multi-faceted approach.

Corporate profits have
doubled since the post-World War II boom years, from an average of 6
percent of GDP to more than 12 percent today, Hanauer pointed out, and
yet “job growth remains anemic, wages are flat, and our nation can no
longer seem to afford even its most basic needs.” Stock buybacks—which
(as explained here) were virtually forbidden from 1934 through 1982—are a
key reason why our economy is so cash-starved when it comes to
wealth-producing investments:

Over the past decade, the companies that make up the S&P 500 have spent an astounding 54 percent of profits
on stock buybacks. Last year alone, U.S. corporations spent about $700
billion, or roughly 4 percent of GDP, to prop up their share prices by
repurchasing their own stock….

It is mathematically impossible to
make the public- and private-sector investments necessary to sustain
America’s global economic competitiveness while flushing away 4 percent
of GDP year after year.

Hence, Hanauer argued, it’s time to end
stock buybacks—they are crippling our ability to grow our economy
robustly. Along the way, Hanauer also sharply criticized what he called
“the 40-year obsession with ‘shareholder value maximization’” [SVM] as
the narrow-minded definition of corporate purpose, which has been used
to justify, rationalize and obfuscate the buyback explosion, and other
ills of corporate misgovernance that have become commonplace in the
post-1980 era.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson